Fresh Meat: B. Frayn Masters

If you’ve been to a storytelling event in Portland, chances are the dirty little mitts of B. Frayn Masters have been somewhere near it. And if you think storytelling events are too niche for you to care about, the 600 people that filled the Aladdin Theater (disclosure: my employer) for a recent Moth Grand Slam might disagree.

Mortified, a show that began with one creator’s sharing of an awkward love letter amongst friends, has spawned a documentary film and spinoff events in nine cities, including one in Portland, and even one in Sweden. B. Frayn Masters (known just as Frayn to her Frayndlies) isn’t surprised by how many Portlanders have a story to tell, and how many others are willing to pay good money to listen. She’s been spinning that yarn for years.

Her own events—BackFence PDX, BackFence's Russian Roulette version and Entertainment for People’s New Shit Show—are now steady sell-outs now, but they're the product of many years spent nurturing and connecting the local storytelling community.

If given five minutes to tell the story of storytelling in Portland, it might begin with “I told you so.”

Amy Miller: What’s it like to be someone who executes successfully in such a DIY pop-up town?

B. Frayn Masters: Portland is a really receptive town to new shows. In LA, you have to be much more jaded. People would be like, “Oh, you wanna do a storytelling show? That seems cute! Who are you? Who do you know? Who’s gonna be in it? The venue will be a thousand dollars a night and you have to pay for it up front. Do you think any famous people will drop in?"

But here, we’re short on venues but the ones that we have are really willing to work with you and make your shit work. Venues become more of your partner than in other cities.

It's a community. Once you show yourself to be a person who has ideas and executes them in a way that’s professional and fun and lucrative, that’s a key card into meeting other people who do the same, and then you collaborate.

We’ve all been put on the spot of someone saying, “I’ve got a great idea for a show, do you want to be a part of it?” And then you, as someone who has shown yourself to be professional, end up doing all the work to carry out their idea. I don’t mean to seem like an asshole but it’s like, it’s cool that there is a group of people that follow through with their ideas and get good people involved in their shows.

I don’t think you sound like an asshole. There’s a huge gap between having an idea and executing, and people seem to underestimate the amount of work that goes into making a successful show happen. It’s a ton of work.

And it’s a lot of dumb work. It’s a lot of noodling with your website for three or four hours. And you have to monitor your sales online. And advertise. And cast talent and communicate with them. There are all these moving pieces. And if somebody can’t do their piece suddenly, like a volunteer or a performer, suddenly that’s your job. You can’t be above doing anything.

So do you get a lot of idea people barnacling themselves to you in the hopes you’ll execute their vision?

Are you asking if I’m like a shark with remoras hanging off of me in the ocean of Portland? At first, yes. There were those people. But if people have an idea for a project, I’m pretty clear about saying, “I wanna be a writer on that project or I wanna be a collaborator on that project, but I cannot produce that project." And as soon as producorial things start coming my way, that’s a red flag. But I’ve met some younger people that are doing some really cool shit—house shows and other stuff—and that’s exciting to me. They have great ideas and they want to execute them well and that’s good for the artistic community.

Then you get to pass a baton instead of dragging people down the track on your ankles.

Yes, because that’s painful. And eventually you see people fade away because they’re not willing to do the grunt work anyway. I’ll see venues and producers come in and say, “I have all these great performers in town, these people are popular, obviously people are gonna come to my show.” And then no one comes to the show, and everyone is shocked. And people who have big venues are heartbroken. Because they don’t understand why it didn’t work.

Do you think Portland is such an idea town that some venues are less willing to collaborate with you because the bookers may have started off as adventurous idealists and then been burned by too many producers who couldn’t deliver? And now they just ask for the rent up front to cover their own asses?

Yes. It’s their business. They have to have staff, and food prep, and security, and I think a lot of times people don’t understand that when you ask a venue to do something, it’s a partnership. They’ve got to deal with their own business. So you’ve got to highlight their venue and reach back the other way. It’s really a 70/30 partnership. And that’s if you’re lucky. It’s probably largely 90/10.

You have to have empathy for the venue when you’re producing. They’re not an open pocket that’s just gonna be doing stuff for you.

And it’s great to have a great idea. But what you want is for people to come to a 50-seat house and be like “Oh my god, this is such a great idea! You should move to a bigger venue!” You want the audience to direct where your show is headed.

Then the audience feels like they’re on the ground floor of something special. And there’s nothing people in Portland like more than knowing about something before it was cool.

Yes, they need to feel special. And people don’t feel special in a group of five people in a 600-person room. They feel like losers. They feel like, “You made me feel like a loser for choosing this. And I only came because I owed you one and now you’re done. You owe me three.”

A beautiful thing about Portland is the tremendous fan loyalty. There are so many things going on that people start to know which recurring events are quality and then they’ll show up every time. Once you establish credibility, you have some more room to fail and experiment. So if something does go south, your audience is still on board. Rather than feeling like losers, they feel like they just walked into their favorite restaurant on a fluke day and there was no wait. It feels lucky rather than like something’s wrong.

Every show to me is like my birthday party and I’m worried no one’s gonna come. It’s really good when you’ve been a performer for a long time, and an audience member, because you have empathy for the whole circle of the process.

I think of a show like a Kids in the Hall episode. Because they take risks. Usually there’s one sketch that you don’t love, but they take a risk. You have to take risks in everything.

Of the pyramid of talent, in any art form, Portland feels a bit bottom-heavy, wouldn’t you say? Some of that bottom is enthusiastic and new and some of it is just apathetic and willing to phone it in so they can be a part of something. Do you think the fat bottom helps you stand out? Or does it just muddy the waters?

I’ve never really pondered the big bottom. I’m neutral about it. I’m not in a competition; I’m just doing what I wanna do. There’s a place for people who just want to do their craft as a hobby and not take it any further. I don’t think it affects well-produced shows. People are savvy enough to figure out the difference between the two. I do think people should have a circle. They want to find creativity in their lives and I would never want to take that away.

I envy your non-dickish perspective. Maybe it’s different for comedy. Because audiences might be savvy, but if you are a comedy fan and you do take a chance and happen to go to three or four poorly produced shows, you reach an exhaustion point and potentially give up on that art form locally. And I do think it affects the good shows for the better, potentially. Because people stop taking chances, and just come back to the shows you produce because they know it will be a quality show.

I can see that for standup. There’s a tip of the comedy pyramid that hasn’t been here for that long and so I think that people who might have reached an exhaustion point need to give it a chance.

It’s like the comedy scene got our circumcision reversed? And a fresh tip?

Yes, now you have your sensitive skin fold back and you have to clean out the smegma.

So I changed your mind then. And you agree with me ultimately that poorly-produced storytelling events can be harmful to your art form in general but ultimately helpful in the long term if you’re producing something of quality?

Yeah. I think your idea of exhaustion is true. I’m curious what people’s burnout point is, though.

I think as someone’s burnout point gets closer, their loyalty increases as well. Which is good if you’ve already established your audience, but might make it harder for someone just starting who is also producing quality events but doesn’t yet have credibility.

When you do have an event that starts to gain some traction, I think of it as a community, and try to give a nod to other things that I like. That’s part of the responsibility of creating and allowing all of the boats to float at once. That’s how community builds.

And you have to be a decently curious person—curious about new performers, curious about other shows like yours, curious about your audience. All these things are curiosity and some people have no curiosity about their events. You also have to be a little OCD.

And have a deep-seated emptiness and a crippling fear of failure.

It’s true. I’m still learning how to be a better producer. I make mistakes all the time. And the failure feeling never goes away. From show to show to show to show. It never goes away. You sort of just have to live with that.